Voting rights pioneer Homma honoured

Tomey Homma’s impact on the voting rights of modern Canadians was substantial — and his granddaughter figures he would be embarrassed to get any credit for it.

On Sunday, a Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada plaque was unveiled in Homma’s honour in Burnaby, recognizing his fight for the rights of Indigenous and Asian Canadians to vote in the first half of the last century.

Homma’s granddaughter, Tenney Homma, said her grandfather would probably have been embarrassed by being singled out for attention, let alone a plaque.

“He came from a place of collaborativeness, it was the struggle of many,” Tenney said Sunday after the ceremony at the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre.

“My grandfather did what he did because he followed his heart.”

Born into a samurai family in Japan, Tomekichi “Tomey” Homma moved to British Columbia in the late 19th century while still a teenager.

He brought with him a humble duty to service, his granddaughter said. “You don’t boast, you don’t bring forth and talk about one’s accomplishments.” Her grandfather was a man who “walked the talk.”

“The commitment and drive and determination and passion that he exuded in his public life was reflected in his private life,” she said. “Equality, freedom justice, these were items that he sought to develop in his children.”

In 1900, Homma, a Canadian citizen, tried to enter his name on the voters’ list in Vancouver. He was denied because of a provincial law that banned Asian-Canadians as well as First Nations from the vote.

Undeterred, Homma sued the registrar in what was to become a landmark case, now considered one of the most important human rights challenges in Canadian history.

“For him to have the intellect and the understanding to realize that the cornerstone of democracy is to have the right the vote no matter your ethnicity is intriguing,” said his granddaughter. “He said ‘I’m going to challenge the law.’ ”

The county court and the Supreme Court of B.C. ruled in Homma’s favour, but in 1903, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, then the highest legal authority in the Dominion of Canada, upheld the ban.

Homma did not live to see the change he fought for. He died in 1945 in an internment camp in the B.C. Interior, three years before Asian-Canadians secured the right to vote.

Now, more than a half-century later, his own children have died and didn’t get to see their father honoured with a federal plaque.

Tenney said she was thinking of her father Keay and his siblings on Sunday.

“I wish it would have been Tomey’s children (there to witness),” she said. They saw their father interact with people in the Japanese-Canadian community. People would come to speak with him for advice.

What her grandfather did was “significant to the development of democracy in Canada,” she said. “He’ll never be forgotten.”